MYSELF: Have I the good fortune to be speaking to, or with, Dr. Wilbur H. Gumshott, who gave unstintingly of his unrivaled insight into Peruvian wedding rites during the preparation of Chapter 17 of Mildred Worthington’s South American Rhapsody?
DR. G.: Who is this?
MYSELF: I have been entrusted, though fully conscious that there must be many better qualified both by—
DR. G.: Are you aware, sir, whoever you are, that it is three o’clock in the morning, Eastern Standard Time?
MYSELF: I trust it is not an inconvenient moment. The fact is that I have already made calls in the same connection to your colleagues Professor T. R. McGluskey, Mr. Alfred Bains, Mr. Aloysius Mannering, and Dr. Bernard Hackslip, as well as to Miss Freda Staring, the acknowledged authority on the Puelche of Araucania, and to the librarian of the School of Amer-Indian Studies in Beirut, but for whose unfailing encouragement and advice—
DR. G.: That bunch! What Hackslip knows about Peru wouldn’t cover half a file card.
MYSELF: Thank you. That certainly sheds fresh light. I see, however, that the acknowledgment to him and the other colleagues I have mentioned begins “I am particularly grateful,” whereas for yourself and Professor Richard A. Butterstone, of Halifax, Nova Scotia, the phrase “I also desire to thank” was deemed appropriate. May I have your comments on that?
DR. G.: I have nothing to say.
MYSELF: Bearing in mind that the even warmer “I owe a very great debt of gratitude” is reserved for Miss Mabel Gilchrist on this page—
DR. G.: Never heard of her.
MYSELF: She gave invaluable assistance with the typing, thus taking her place on my secretarial ranking list second only to those eleven hundred and forty-eight devoted women whose untiring skill and patience in unraveling what was often, the authors fear, a sadly illegible—
DR. G.: Why don’t you bother the people who write all this rubbish, and leave me alone? I have to get some sleep.
THE question raised by Dr. Gumshott is of some importance. I did, of course, apply direct to some thousands of authors whose prolegomenorrhea (the word was coined for me by my friend Charlie Pyke, B.A., who also drew my attention to the delicate interplay of colon and semicolon in a brilliant list of helpers cited by an otherwise obscure Swedish geophysicist) had brought them within my purview, but the response was not uniformly encouraging. This despite the fact that I was able in many cases to inform them of points of interest of which they themselves appeared to be unaware. Thus, I was the first to advise Mr. Karl Strummholtz that in singling out for special mention in the Introduction to his Volcanoes in Antiquity no less than seventy-five friends and colleagues, fifteen universities or other institutes, the mother superior of a nunnery, three typists, his publisher, five proofreaders, and both his first and second wives (who “cheerfully bore”) he had established a record for scientific works outside the field of ornithology. Others had not even troubled to reflect that, by removing their acknowledgments to a separate section headed “Acknowledgments,” they ran the risk of reducing their Introduction readership to nil, apart from psychopaths like myself. In volunteering information, in their turn, I found writers uncoöperative to such a degree that I feel unable to thank more than three hundred and seventy of them by name (Appendix IV). To a simple written questionnaire requesting answers to such inquiries as
In the preparation of your Introductions, by what authors have you been especially influenced; e.g., as to style, presentation, addition of “Majorca, 1967” at the end, etc.?
Have you acknowledged this debt?
Who is this Lady Alice Brackenbury who so kindly translated the Chinese quatrain on this page?
What do you mean, exactly, by “unsparing”?
For every half-dozen colleagues gratified by a mention, how many took immortal umbrage from (a) total omission, or (b) the “lumping” technique?
most authors did not bother to reply. Of those who did, a disappointingly high proportion complained that only the preliminary pages of their books appeared to have been read. This attitude, as between specialists, struck me as inexplicable.
It only remains to add that in the final stages of this work I have been sustained by the Vicar, by a certain Mrs. Potter (or possibly Cotter), of Exeter, who, in the act of measuring my settee for a new slipcover, inadvertently or intentionally made off with three pages from Chapter 2, and by so indefatigable an army of other critics that I have reluctantly been forced to hold their names over to an additional Appendix (V). Nevertheless, any errors and omissions remain entirely mine, and for this sole residuum of my labors I am profoundly grateful.
The Channel Islands,
Wednesday
1969
*This parenthesis took the form of a footnote in my original draft, but it was unsparingly pointed out to me by Mr. Wilberforce Butt, O.B.E.,** who most generously read through the greater part of these preliminary pages, that the use of footnotes in Introductions is atypical—except for such unavoidable addenda as “e.g.” **Now Sir Wilberforce Butt, K.B.E.
GARRISON KEILLOR
JACK SCHMIDT ARTS ADMINISTRATOR
IT was one of those sweltering days toward the end of the fiscal year when Minneapolis smells of melting asphalt and foundation money is as tight as a rusted nut. Ninety-six, the radio said on the way in from the airport, and back at my office in the Acme Building I was trying to fan the memory of ocean breezes in Hawaii, where I had just spent two days attending a conference on Midwestern regionalism.
It wasn’t working. I was sitting down, jacket off, feet up, looking at the business end of an air-conditioner, and a numb spot was forming around my left ear to which I was holding a telephone and listening to Bobby Jo, my secretary at the Twin Cities Arts Mall, four blocks away, reading little red numerals off a sheet of paper. We had only two days before the books snapped shut, and our administrative budget had sprung a deficit big enough to drive a car through—a car full of accountants. I could feel the deficit spreading a dark sweat stain across the back of my best blue shirt.
“Listen,” I sputtered, “I still got some loose bucks in the publicity budget. Let’s transfer that to administration.”
“J.S.,” she sighed, “I just got done telling you. Those loose bucks are as spent as an octogenarian after an all-night bender. Right now, we’re using more red ink than the funny papers, and yesterday we bounced three checks right off the bottom of the account. That budget is so unbalanced, it’s liable to go out and shoot somebody.”
You could’ve knocked me over with a rock.
“Sweetheart,” I lied quietly, hoping she couldn’t hear my heavy breathing, “don’t worry about it. Old Jack has been around the block once or twice. I’ll straighten it out.”
“Payday is tomorrow,” she replied sharply. “Twelve noon.”
THE Arts Mall is just one of thirty-seven arts organizations I administer, a chain that stretches from the Anaheim Puppet Theatre to the Title IX Poetry Center in Bangor, and I could have let it go down the tubes, but hell, I kind of like the joint. It’s an old National Tea supermarket that we renovated in 1976, when Bicentennial money was wandering around like helpless buffalo, and it houses seventeen little shops—mainly pottery and macrame, plus a dulcimer-maker, a print-maker, a spatter painter, two sculptors, and a watering hole called The Barre. This is one of those quiet little joints where you aren’t driven crazy by the constant ringing of cash registers. A nice place to drink but you wouldn’t want to own it.
I hung up the phone and sat for a few minutes eyeballing an old nine-by-twelve glossy of myself, trying to get inspired. It’s not a bad likeness. Blue pin-striped suit, a headful of hair, and I’m looking straight into 1965 like I owned it, and as for my line of work, anyone who has read The Blonde in 204, Close Before Striking, The Big Tipper, and The Mark of a Heel knows that I’m not big on ballet.
I wasn’t real smart at spotting trends, either. The private-eye business was scraping bottom. I spent my days supporting a bookie and
my nights tailing guys who weren’t going anywhere anyway. My old pals at Jimmy’s were trading in their wingtips and porkpie hats for Frye boots and Greek fisherman caps and growing big puffs of hair around their ears. Mine was the only suit that looked slept-in. I felt like writing to the Famous Shamus School and asking what I was doing wrong.
“It’s escapism, Mr. Schmidt,” quavered Ollie, the elevator boy, one morning when I complained that nobody needed a snoop anymore. “I was reading in the Gazette this morning where they say this is an age of anti-intellectualism. A sleuth like yourself, now, you represent the spirit of inquiry, the scientific mind, eighteenth-century enlightenment, but heck, people don’t care about knowing the truth anymore. They just want to have experiences.”
“Thanks for the tip, Ollie,” I smiled, flipping him a quarter. “And keep your eyes open.”
I was having an experience myself at the time and her name was Trixie, an auburn-haired beauty who moved grown men to lie down in her path and wave their arms and legs. I was no stronger than the rest, and when she let it be known one day that the acting studio where she studied nights was low on cash and might have to close and thus frustrate her career, I didn’t ask her to type it in triplicate. I got the dough. I learned then and there that true artists are sensitive about money. Trixie took the bundle and the next day she moved in with a sandal-maker. She said I wasn’t her type. Too materialistic.
Evidently I was just the type that every art studio, mime troupe, print gallery, folk-ballet company, and wind ensemble in town was looking for, though, and the word got around fast: Jack Schmidt knows how to dial a telephone and make big checks arrive in the mail. Pretty soon my outer office was full of people with long delicate fingers, waiting to tell me what marvellous, marvellous things they could do if only they had ten thousand dollars (minus my percentage). It didn’t take me long to learn the rules—about twenty minutes. First rule: Ten thousand is peanuts. Pocket money. Any arts group that doesn’t need a hundred grand and need it now just isn’t thinking hard enough.
My first big hit was a National Endowment for the Arts grant for a walkup tap school run by a dishwater blonde named Bonnie Marie Beebe. She also taught baton, but we stressed tap on the application. We called the school The American Conservatory of Jazz Dance. A hundred and fifty thousand clams. “Seed money” they called it, but it was good crisp lettuce to me.
I got the Guild of Younger Poets fifty thousand from the Teamsters to produce some odes to the open road, and another fifteen from a lumber tycoon with a yen for haiku. I got a yearlong folk-arts residency for a guy who told Scandinavian jokes, and I found wealthy backers for a play called Struck by Lightning, by a nonliteralist playwright who didn’t write a script but only spoke with the director a few times on the phone.
Nobody was too weird for Jack Schmidt. In every case, I had met weirder on the street. The Minnesota Anti-Dance Ensemble, for example, is a bunch of sweet kids. They simply don’t believe in performance. They say that “audience” is a passive concept, and they spend a lot of time picketing large corporations in protest against the money that has been given to them, which they say comes from illicit profits. It doesn’t make my life easier, but heck, I was young once, too. Give me a choice, I’ll take a radical dance group over a Renaissance-music ensemble any day. Your average shawm or sackbut player thinks the world owes him a goddam living.
So I was off the pavement and into the arts, and one day Bobby Jo walked in, fresh out of St. Cloud State Normal and looking for money to teach interior decorating to minority kids, and she saw I needed her more. She threw out my electric fan and the file cabinet with the half-empty fifth in the third drawer and brought in some Mondrian prints and a glass-topped desk and about forty potted plants. She took away my .38 and made me switch to filter cigarettes and had stationery printed up that looks like it’s recycled from beaten eggs. “Arts Consultant,” it says, but what I sell is the same old hustle and muscle, which was a new commodity on the arts scene then.
“What your arts organizations need is a guy who can ask people for large amounts without blushing and twisting his hankie,” I told her one day, en route to Las Palmas for a three-day seminar on the role of the arts in rural America. “Your typical general manager of an arts organization today is nothing but a bagman. He figures all he has to do is pass the hat at the board meeting and the Throttlebottoms will pick up the deficit. The rest of the time he just stands around at lawn parties and says witty things. But the arts are changing, Bobby Jo. Nowadays, everybody wants arts, not just the rich. It’s big business. Operating budgets are going right through the ceiling. All of a sudden, Mr. Arts Guy finds the game has changed. Now he has to work for the money and hit up corporations and think box office and dive in and fight for a slice of the government pie, and it scares him right out of his silk jammies. That’s when he calls for Schmidt.”
She slipped her hand into mine. I didn’t take her pulse or anything, but I could tell she was excited by the way her breath came in quick little gasps.
“Now anyone who can spell ‘innovative’ can apply for a grant, government or otherwise,” I went on, “but that doesn’t mean that the bozo who reads the application is necessarily going to bust into tears and run right down to Western Union. He needs some extra incentive. He needs to know that this is no idle request for funds typed up by somebody who happened to find a blank application form at the post office. He needs to know that you are counting on the cash, that you fully expect to get it, and that if you are denied you are capable of putting his fingers in a toaster. The arts are growing, Bobby Jo, and you and me are going to make it happen.”
“You’re a visionary, J.S.,” she murmured. “You have a tremendous overall concept but you need a hand when it comes to the day-to-day.”
“Speaking of ideas,” I muttered hoarsely, and I pulled the lap blanket up over our heads. She whispered my initials over and over in a litany of passion. I grabbed her so hard her ribs squeaked.
IT was a rough morning. After Bobby Jo’s phone call, I got another from the Lawston Foundry, informing me that Stan Lewandowski’s sculpture, Oppresso, would not be cast in time for the opening of the Minot Performing Arts Center. The foundry workers, after hearing what Lewandowski was being paid for creating what looked to them like a large gerbil cage, went out on strike, bringing the sculpture to a standstill. I wasted fifteen minutes trying to make a lunch date with Hugo Groveland, the mining heir, to discuss the Arts Mall. He was going away for a while, Groveland said, and didn’t know when he’d be back, if ever. He hinted at dark personal tragedies that were haunting him and suggested I call his mother. “She’s more your type,” he said, “plus she’s about to kick off, if you know what I mean.”
On top of it, I got a call from the director of our dinner theater in upstate Indiana. He had been irked at me for weeks since I put the kibosh on Hedda Gabler. He had been plumping for a repertory theater. “Fine,” I said. “As long as you make it Fiddler on the Roof, The Sunshine Boys, and Man of La Mancha.” Now he was accusing us of lacking a commitment to new writers. He said I was in the business of exploiting talent, not developing it.
“Listen, pal,” I snarled. “As a director, you’d have a hard time getting people to act normal. So don’t worry about me exploiting your talent. Just make sure you have as many people in the cast as there are parts. And tell your kitchen to slice the roast beef thin.”
So he quit. I wished I could, too. I had a headache that wouldn’t. And an Arts Mall with twenty-four hours to live.
“It’s a whole trend called the New Naïveté,” offered Ollie when I asked him why artists seemed to hate me, on the way down to lunch. “I was reading in the Gazette where they say people nowadays think simplicity is a prime virtue. They want to eliminate the middleman. That’s you, Mr. Schmidt. Traditionally, your role has been that of a buffer between the individual and a cruel world. But now people think the world is kind and good, if only they could deal with it directly. They think if they g
ot rid of the middleman—the bureaucracy, whatever you want to call it—then everything would be hunky-dory.”
“Thanks, Ollie,” I said as the elevator doors opened. “Let’s have lunch sometime.”
It reminded me of something Bobby Jo had said in a taxicab in Rio, where we were attending a five-day conference on the need for a comprehensive system of evaluating arts information. “It’s simple, J.S.,” she said. “The problem is overhead. Your fat cats will give millions to build an arts center, but nobody wants to donate to pay the light bill because you can’t put a plaque on it. They’ll pay for Chippewa junk sculpture but who wants to endow the janitor?”
“Speaking of endowments,” I whispered hoarsely, and I leaned over and pressed my lips hungrily against hers. I could feel her earlobes trembling helplessly.
THE mining heir’s mother lived in a mansion out on Mississippi Drive. The carpet in the hall was so deep it was like walking through a swamp. The woman who opened the door inspected me carefully for infectious diseases, then led me to a sitting room on the second floor that could’ve gone straight into the Cooper-Hewitt Museum. Mrs. Groveland sat in a wing chair by the fireplace. She looked pretty good for a woman who was about to make the far turn.
Disquiet, Please! Page 19